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By Abigail R. Hall | Saturday August 1, 2015 at 5:35 AM PDT | Comments Off on Still Won’t Stand with Rand

Last week I published a piece on Rand Paul. In particular, I argued that Paul or any other “libertarian” political figure would not generate the changes desired by those who value liberty. The responses to this post have been numerous. Many people agree with me. For others, it’s as though I backhanded their mothers...Read More »

By Sam Staley | Friday December 20, 2013 at 8:27 AM PDT | Comments Off on Catching the Hint of Liberty in “Catching Fire” and “The Hunger Games”

Catching Fire, the second installment in the trilogy of films based on The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins, is burning through the box office, raking in revenues of more than $360 million since its November release. This makes the movie the third highest grossing movie of the year. And this bodes well for...Read More »

The world-renowned philosopher Alvin C. Plantinga has recently received the prestigious Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh’s Departments of Philosophy, History, and Philosophy of Science, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. Plantinga is widely known for his work in the philosophy of...Read More »

Journalist Alexander Cockburn has died after a painful battle with cancer at the age of 71. Cockburn wrote for The Nation and co-edited Counterpunch, my favorite radical leftist website. Whenever I talked about there being hope on the left, I was mainly thinking about people like Cockburn. Cockburn embodied the admirable concerns of leftism—good conditions...Read More »

My previous posts on The Hunger Games prompted a reader to question whether Katniss Everdeen, the 16 year-old protagonist in the trilogy and movie, should really be celebrated if she is, as I describe her, “Randian.” It’s an interesting question, and it prompted me to think about the different ways that libertarian or libertarian-leaning...Read More »

We live in a secularized world of nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is unwelcome. Rooted in the “Enlightenment,” this view supports a secularized and authoritarian public square enforced by government and that progress requires forcing religion ever backward into remote corners of society. In short, America has become a secular theocracy...Read More »

For decades, some Christians, both “conservative” and “liberal,” have unfortunately embraced an ill-conceived “progressive” (i.e., authoritarian) vision to wield intrusive government powers as an unquestionable and even sanctified calling for both domestic and international matters, abandoning the Christian, natural-law tradition in moral ethics and economics. In contrast, the Oxford/Cambridge scholar and best-selling author C....Read More »

In the current issue of Books & Culture, Professor Paul Harvey (not to be confused with the late radio icon) takes aim at my “imagined” (read: invented) tradition of classical liberalism on race. You can read his full review here. Harvey concedes that Race and Liberty in America rediscovers “understudied authors.” Then he quickly...Read More »